The Inheritors

The Inheritors by William Golding takes place in the paleolithic; the characters are a small group of Neanderthals who are making a yearly migration to their summer settlement.  The story mainly focuses on one of the men, Lok, and a female, Fa.  While at a rocky overhang where they stopped to make camp, one of their men goes missing - there was also the smell of people unknown to them.  The rest of the book centers around the conflict the Neanderthal band faces against our early ancestors, Homo sapiens.

These new people speak strangely, look different, and have strange ways of doing seemingly complex things.  The Neanderthals Golding provides for us as the primary characters are by no means the primitive, grunting ape-men often depicted in earlier literature and film, which I find a little surprising since it was published in 1962.  Lok and his people may not be using tools in the way the early humans do once they appear on the scene, and they are quite wary of being in water, but they have a definite intelligence, simple though it may seem to us.

Jane Austen for Dummies

Jane Austen for Dummies by Dr. Joan Klingel Ray is, of course, a part of the ever-growing line of " --- for Dummies" books.  Dr. Ray is a former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America and teaches courses on Austen at university.  This book is full of information about everything Austen - her life, her writing, and her family.  It also provides a great deal of information about life in general during the Regency period, which (as you likely know) is the time during which Jane Austen lived.  Dr. Ray also includes something of a Jane Austen tour guide in one chapter, listing Austen-related places to visit in England (as well as directions on how to get to each place and a URL to the location's website, if one exists).  There are also Top Ten lists and some ideas for discussion for a Jane Austen reading group.  The set-up of the contents is designed so that a straight read-through is not necessary.  You can skip around if you want, to read just the information you're looking for, and anything within each section that might require more information for a better understanding is marked by giving (in parentheses) the chapter where that information can be located.

Don't let the title throw you -  if you are making the choice to read Jane Austen or to read more about her life, then obviously you have excellent taste and are no dummy!